Celebrating 180 years of The London Library - Suzannah Lipscomb

To spend a day at The London Library, in normal times, is a glorious relief from the rest of life: a day spent wallowing in reading and quiet companionable concentration, rummaging through the Stacks, or finding a moment of thought pierced by a sudden rush of wonder at the beauty of some architectural feature. It’s to encounter serendipities: chancing upon an unexpected friend or finding just the right book. It’s the privilege of being in the very places where august authors have written brilliantly. Above all, it’s the opportunity to rifle through a collection of thousands of books on almost every conceivable subject. To spend a day at The London Library, to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Clark, is to step into a clearing in the jungle and be renewed by a glimpse of the sky.

But if I loved The London Library before lockdown, I think I love it with even greater fervour since. Who else will send by post a bloated 1907 edition of Spanish letters from an ambassador to Henry VII’s court, a slim memoir about queer mothering, and the complete correspondence of a Tudor queen? In this time when most archives have been impossible to access, these care-packages and the Library’s access to online journals and e-books have kept my writing life alive. I thank God for The London Library; there is nowhere else like it.

The award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster is Professor of History at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a History Today columnist